If Congress does nothing, a new policy will take effect in less than two months that will make it easier than ever for the FBI to infiltrate, monitor, copy data from, inject malware into, and otherwise damage computers remotely.

If you scroll through EFF’s staff bios, you may notice a trend: we have a lot of reporters who have joined the battle for free speech, privacy, and transparency. Some worked for years in newsrooms or as independent journalists. Others studied and taught at journalism schools or worked directly for journalism advocacy organizations. This kind of experience is often a perfect fit for tech policy advocacy, because reporters have a practical understanding of how important our rights are and how to communicate these issues to the public. And ultimately, EFF’s work is not unlike journalism: we fight to free information and then we write about it.

After months of study, European regulators have finally released the full and final proposal on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, and unfortunately it's full of ideas that will hurt users and the platforms on which they rely, in Europe and around the world. We've already written a fair bit about leaked version of this proposal, but it's worth taking a deeper dive into a particular provision, euphemistically described as sharing of value. This provision, Article 13 of the Directive, requires platform for user-generated content to divert some of their revenue to copyright holders who, the Commission claims, otherwise face a hard time in monetizing their content online. We strongly support balanced and sensible mechanisms that help ensure that artists get paid for their work. But this proposal is neither balanced nor sensible.

We believe in celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics every day, and today – Ada Lovelace Day – is no different. Named after visionary 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace, today is an opportunity to recognize the achievements of women in the STEM fields.

Lovelace, who is credited with being among the first to recognize the potential of computing, was encouraged to explore the world of mathematics from a young age at a time when few women were actively involved in the field. At 17, she worked on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and her notes on his machine included what is recognized as the first computer algorithm as well as ideas about the potential of computational machines.

After eighteen years, we may finally see real reform to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s unconstitutional pro-DRM provisions. But we need your help.

In enacting the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the DMCA, Congress ostensibly intended to stop copyright “pirates” from defeating DRM and other content access or copy restrictions on copyrighted works and to ban the “black box” devices intended for that purpose. In practice, the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions haven’t had much impact on unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content. Instead, they’ve hampered lawful creativity, innovation, competition, security, and privacy.

By the time you read this, Let’s Encrypt will have issued its 12 millionth certificate, of which 6 million are active and unexpired. With these milestones, Let’s Encrypt now appears to us to be the the Internet’s largest certificate authority—but a recent analysis by W3Techs said we were only the third largest. So in this post we investigate: how big is Let’s Encrypt, really?